News Outlets Gain as Hispanics Turn to English Media

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The Hispanic population in the United States is growing much faster than the formerly dominant white, non-Latin one. That may have been a threat to traditional media outlets. However, it turns out that Hispanics have turned increasingly to English-based news.

Data from a new Pew Research Hispanic Center study should worry Univision, a lot. And it should hearten traditional cable and broadcast news outlets like CNN and Fox News. Data from the survey show:

The rise in use of English news sources has been driven by an increase in the share of Hispanics who say they get their news exclusively in English. According to the survey, one-third (32%) of Hispanic adults in 2012 did this, up from 22% in 2006. By contrast, the share of Hispanic adults who get their news exclusively in Spanish has decreased to 18% in 2012 from 22% in 2006.

As the Hispanic population grows, oddly so does the extent to which the rising number of people in this demographic turn to incumbent news outlets, which should be concerned that their audiences will fall as a result of the availability of Spanish-language reporting.

Traditional news outlets have lost much of their audiences to the Internet. For these old-world media, there is also some portion of good news, if Hispanic consumption of traditional news holds as people migrate to the Internet. And newspapers take a beating, as has been the case with the medium for some time, regardless of reader group:

  • Fully 86% of Latino adults say that on a typical weekday they get their news from television. That is down slightly from 92% who said the same in 2006 but is higher than the share of Latinos who get their news from radio (56%), the internet (56%) or print newspapers (42%).
  • Use of internet news media has grown among Latino adults. Today more than half (56%) say they consume news media on a typical weekday from the internet, up from 37% in 2006.
  • Radio news media and print newspapers have seen the biggest declines in use among Latino adults. Use of radio is down from 64% in 2006 to 56% in 2012. Use of print newspapers is down even more sharply, from 58% in 2006 to 42% in 2012.

Traditional TV news has not had much positive to say about its future. The Pew data changes that.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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